Winston Churchill once insisted: “Take this pudding away—it has no theme.” The campaign for the Presidency now has a theme. Too bad.

First, too bad because its origin resulted from death—a single death, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Prior to the Justice’s death the theme seemed to be organized around a lot of deaths—the consequences of Covid 19.

My view about who we should choose to be President is principally informed by the fact that each four years offers up unanticipated challenges and sometimes calamities and we should choose a person who we are confident can lead the government’s response. Who is up for the job, that is the question. We are not offered, in 2020, a particularly encouraging choice.

Now and once again the Supreme Court composition will, for many, become the election’s context—the pivotal issue.

The Supreme Court’s composition is always important, but it has in recent decades become central. Congress has become riven with infantilizing partisanship and as this democratic element in America’s balance of powers has failed, the Executive branch tries to take over—a strange American-style authoritarianism.

President Obama captured the style: CBS reported, “Obama’s reliance on his executive powers and his bully pulpit — at the White House it’s called his “pen-and-phone” strategy — illustrates the means at his disposal to drive policy but also highlights the limits of his ability to work with Congress.” President Trump has doubled down on this approach. 

The Courts and ultimately the Supreme Court are left to decide whether the Executive Branch has gone too far—whether its actions are constitutional. President Trump and his foes engaged the judicial branch immediately.

Wikipedia reports that “Trump signed 24 executive orders in his first 100 days, the most executive orders of any President since World War II.” The Courts were quickly engaged. Wikipedia further notes, “Legal challenges to these orders were brought almost immediately after their issuance. From January 28 to 31 almost 50 cases were filed in federal courts.”

Washington is an unsentimental town. The consequences of Justice Ginsburg’s death have filled up Twitter since the earliest announcement. A number of researchers/journalists have noted that it takes an average of around 70 days from nomination to final vote on Supreme Court nominations. The importance of the nine justices should require both a thoughtful and rigorous process. 

But, when the next justice becomes the issue the protocols and timing of the past become bothersome facts. And maybe that is just as well, given where we are as a nation. The fight to come, both the process and the selection, will certainly highlight differences in vivid terms. 

Twenty-four hours ago the election was about the White House and who would control the United States Senate. Now the election is about the other branch, the one that actually makes final decisions.  

Al Sikes is the former Chair of the Federal Communications Commission under George H.W. Bush. Al recently published Culture Leads Leaders Follow published by Koehler Books. 

 

Joe Biden has been very critical of President Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

He has said, “Do you really feel safer under Donald Trump? COVID has taken this year, just since the outbreak, has taken more than 100 years. Look, the lives, when you think about it, more lives this year than any other year for the past 100 years. More than 180,000 lives in just six months, an average of 1,000 people dying every day in the month of August.”

So, do you ever wonder how Biden would have fared under similar circumstances? Actually, you don’t have to wonder, we know.

In 2009, the country got hit by another pandemic called H1N1. “Biden took point on the White House’s response to the outbreak, multiple administration officials told Politico.” According to the CDC’s mid range estimates, 61 million people in the United States were infected and 12,470 died.

Kimberley Strassel’s enlightening article in the Wall Street Journal reveals the facts on how the Obama/Biden administration faced that pandemic.

While “other countries started shutting facilities, telling citizens to stay home, quarantining visitors,” Obama/Biden did none of those things and “took a resigned approach to its spread.” Borders were not closed, quarantine of the healthy was not mandated, businesses were not shuttered.

But protocols were put into place. According to CDC guidelines then, “These recommended actions are:

Wash hands frequently with soap and water. If soap and water are not available, use an alcohol-based hand rub*

Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when coughing or sneezing.

Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth

People who are sick with an influenza-like illness (ILI) (fever plus at least cough or sore throat and possibly other symptoms like runny nose, body aches, headaches, chills, fatigue, vomiting and diarrhea) should stay home and keep away from others as much as possible, including avoiding travel, for at least 24 hours after fever is gone except to get medical care or for other necessities. (Fever should be gone without the use of fever-reducing medicine).

Avoid close contact (i.e. being within about 6 feet) with persons with ILI.

Sound familiar?

However, “In community and home settings, the use of face masks and respirators generally are not recommended.”

How about a vaccine for N1H1?

“In early 2009, a new H1N1 influenza virus — also known as the “swine flu” — emerged in Mexico, with the World Health Organization declaring the outbreak a pandemic in mid-June.

“By late April of that year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had already started working on a vaccine. The government promised that 120 to 160 million doses of H1N1 vaccine would be available by October to head off an expected second wave of infections.

“But when October arrived, only about 23 million doses were available to states, with fewer than 17 million doses shipped that month, according to a report to Congress on the government’s pandemic response.

“Dr. Rebecca Wurtz, an infectious disease physician and population health informaticist in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, said the government also did a poor job of communicating where the vaccine would be available and who should be first in line to get it.

“‘The vaccine wasn’t always available when people needed it or where they needed it,’ she said.

“These problems led to a drop in public confidence.”

“A Gallup survey from early November 2009 found that 54 percent of adults said the federal government was doing a poor or very poor job of providing the country with an adequate supply of the H1N1 vaccine.” Healthline, 8/10/2020.

The only good news was that “H1N1 turned out to be less deadly than had been feared.” Had the mortality rate been the same rate as for COVID-19, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center, 1,830,000 people would have died.

In a rare moment of candor, “Former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain said at Texas A&M in 2019: ‘We did every possible thing wrong. Sixty million Americans got H1N1 in that period of time, and it is just purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass-casualty events in American history. [It] had nothing to do with us doing anything right; just had to do with luck. If anyone thinks that can’t happen again, they don’t have to go back to 1918. Just go back to 2009, 2010. Imagine a virus with a different lethality, and you can just do the math.’”

Dealing with the unknown is difficult. Joe Biden showed us just how difficult in 2009 and he should be much more tempered and balanced in his comments about the Trump administration response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

What is the real record of Trump’s actions on COVID-19?

“Testifying before Congress on Friday (7/31/2020), Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly credited President Trump for coronavirus policy decisions that saved lives.

“Those measures included Trump’s decisions to ban flights from China, the UK and the rest of Europe, and the administration’s “Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread” quarantine policy, initially ordered in mid-March and then extended to a total 30 days.

“Appearing before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Response, Fauci said he participated in, and approved of, all of those policies — and that he believes they all resulted in the saving of lives.”

Steve Carns is a former executive with IBM Corporation and a twenty-five year resident of Talbot County. He lives in the town of Easton. 

Not surprisingly, given the last four years of intense political and social divisiveness in our country, the upcoming election will be anything but ordinary. In fact, without exaggeration, the 2020 presidential vote may be the most important in American history since the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, which led to the secession of seven states.

Not only are the flames of division apparent, but the tools to stroke these fires are also unprecedented. The deceptive use of social media, unwelcomed interference from other countries, and the media’s constant focus on the dangers of the radical right or the extreme left have escalated this year’s election to such a level where civil discourse itself is threatened.

As we enter into this unstable environment, it has been essential to revisit the Spy’s mission of providing a safe harbor for different points of view.

The political world has changed dramatically since 2009 when we began our work. The national conversation about all things political has been profoundly disruptive regarding how America talks about its issues. Since the 2016 election, friendships have ended, communities have been divided, while even the most thoughtful of voters find themselves involuntarily drawn to echo chambers often rampant with lies or half-truths. More alarming has been the use of name-calling or other toxic language in an attempt to win arguments rather than rely on the pros and cons of a certain point of policy. 

Candidly, some of this can also be seen in the Spy’s current range of columnists, op-ed writers, our letters to the editors, and reader comments.  While understandable, this form of partisan dialogue has never been our objective.

The Spy has always taken special pride in the fact that we had not only attracted gifted writers of impressive backgrounds,  but that those authors covered the full range of America’s political spectrum.

That full range of political thought is now difficult to find. In the Trump era, we’ve seen many of our writers, as both lifelong Republicans and philosophical conservatives, finding themselves alienated from the current administration’s approach to both policy and leadership. While it is understandable that one’s political views are rarely static, the net result has been the unexpected dilemma of  the Spy not being able to consistently present arguments to support and/or defend the Trump administration’s policies.

In addition, the 2020 election has become much more a referendum on character than policy. The character of a presidential candidate itself is a reasonable and essential value for every voter to consider, but all too often, it has marginalized the importance of talking seriously about climate change, poverty, world peace or countless other issues that impact our lives. 

In taking a hard look at what the Spy itself can bring to the table, I’ve concluded that there is no reason to duplicate the current debate on the character of Donald Trump or Joe Biden now taking place in the vast majority of American media outlets. Those newspapers and news channels can do that job much better and more comprehensively than a small group of hyperlocal news sites which values education over journalism.

What we can do is to encourage a healthy debate on policy, both enacted by the Trump administration or proposed by the Biden campaign.

It will be left to others to evaluate these significant differences and their impact on our country. But the danger of not prioritizing these as fundamental to ensure a well-informed electorate is clear.

With apologies to songwriter Joni Mitchell, the Spy will encourage the concept of sharing both sides now.  We will seek out Republican, Democratic and independent thinking on the most critical issues of our time with the special request that these be separated from the personalities and character flaws of those that advocate those policies.

That is not an easy task for writers nor their editors. It is instinctive to comment on the motives and contradictions of both Trump and Biden in this election. In some cases, those inconsistencies are not only significant to highlight when talking about policy, but they are also essential in educating the general public on complex issues.

Nonetheless, we will encourage all of the Spy’s contributors to avoid the trap of using moral indignation or character assassination for the simple but compelling reason that those “trigger” phases will defeat their objective of attracting the undecided or the ill-informed to hear their perspective of an issue.

We think our region needs to see both sides of an issue to make an informed decision on whom to vote for this November. The Spy is dedicated to this objective even if our ability to control the dialogue is limited. 

In the meantime, thank you again for your interest and support of the Spy newspapers. 

Dave Wheelan
Publisher
The Spy Newspapers